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Roswell Alien Photo – Another “Smoking Gun” Bites the Dust

Most people, even those who do not follow UFO stories, know or think they know about what happened near Roswell, New Mexico(1) on July 8, 1947.

A weather balloon crashed on a ranch near Roswell and was recovered by the military. The initial press released described the balloon as a “flying disk” but the account was soon corrected to indicate that it was a weather balloon.

In the 1990s, the military admitted that the balloon was being used to monitor nuclear tests, an aspect of the story that was classified at the time.

Crashed Alien Spacecraft

Starting in the late 1970s a number of lurid accounts suggested that the balloon was in fact a crashed alien spacecraft and that its dead occupants had been taken to a military base for examination.

The Roswell Incident, as it came to be called, is the origin of a great many UFO conspiracy theories.

One of the so-called pieces of evidence that support the idea of aliens at Roswell was the Kodachrome slides, which came to light in 2012, according to the UK Guardian(2). The slides were taken in the 1940s and 1950s and include various vacation pictures of European towns as well as pictures of celebrities such as Dwight Eisenhower, Bing Cosby, and Clark Gable.

The slides belonged to the sister of Joseph Beason, who handed them to a former business partner, Adam Dew, a videographer living in Chicago.

Two of the slides piqued Dew’s interest. They appeared to be of a dead alien lying on a platform of some kind with a placard whose wording was blurred. Dew was vaguely aware of the Roswell Incident. So he contacted a UFO researcher named Tom Carey, who had some anthropology in his background.

Carey noted that the “alien body” looked exactly like those that had been described to him during his research into the Roswell Incident. He begin to suspect that he had concrete evidence that the military had acquired alien corpses in 1947 and had covered that fact up.

Verifying the Slides

Nevertheless, Carey, along with Beason and a ranch owner from Wisconsin named Don Schmitt, who had also written a number of books on Roswell, began the task of verifying the Kodachrome slides. They showed the slides to a number of academics and other experts. The Kodak lab verified that the slides had been taken between 1945 and 1950, making it possible that those of the “alien bodies” had been taken at Roswell at the time of the event.

The original owner, a woman named Hilda Blair, may have had some government connections and lived with her husband in Midland, Texas, 250 miles from Roswell. Carey showed the alien body slides to a man named Eleazar Benavides, an Air Force veteran who claimed to have seen the alien bodies as they were brought in for examination. Benavides confirmed that the images were what he had seen almost 70 years ago.

Rumors started trickling out to the UFO community that someone had pictures of dead aliens. Eventually, Carey revealed the existence of the Kodachrome slides at a UFO conference in November, 2014. The UFO community reacted with skepticism. If Carey had pictures of dead aliens, why would he not show them? The reaction on social media was particularly vicious.

Finally the slides were revealed at an extravaganza in Mexico City called BeWitness for which 7,000 attendees paid between $20 and $86.

Skepticism and the Truth

However, the big revelation only deepened skepticism among the UFO community. Many people who saw the pictures projected on a big screen thought they saw a reflection of a woman’s leg and a bench. The truth, though, came out when a member of the Roswell Slides Research Group going by the screen name of Neb Lator processed the image using software called SmartDeBlur Pro, the wording on the placard came into focus and read: “Mummified Body of Two Year-Old Boy.”

After more research and considerable finger pointing, a group of debunkers traced the slide to the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado, where the child’s body had been on display for many years. The space alien was, in fact, a Native American child discovered in a cave dwelling in Arizona.

Carey and Schmitt suspected that they had been duped by Beason and Dew. In any case, the story is a cautionary tale about how sloppy research combined with a wish to believe can lead to error and embarrassment.